When I was five years old, my folks put up a double wide garage door to shade the patio at the back of our house. It attached to the retaining wall that kept Jo Bartz’s hillside front yard from falling into ours when it rained, and was held up in front by two four by fours.
It was coolest at the back of that shady place, right next to the wall, where were two iron-framed canvas-seated butterfly chairs and a small table made it the perfect place to curl up and read. In those hills of Echo Park, there was usually a small breeze and the deep shade became a perfect cozy corner of my life.
Sometime after Dad left, Mom designed and had her father help build an addendum to the garage door shade. With turn buckles and guy wire, they strapped up big flat colorful geometric shapes between the house and garage door. They cast lovely shadows of triangles, squares and circles onto the red cement below. Gramps Stern used old nose-cone material from McDonnell Douglas where he worked until 1964. By then, my step-dad Leo lived with my mom and me, and my little brother Steven had been born.
The new addition to the shade cover worked wonderfully. My grandfather was a natural born engineer who worked in the aircraft industry from 1910 until he retired. He designed the tools to build the tools that built airplanes. Even in the stiffest Santa Ana winds and winter storms, the shade cover held up. Mom painted the cinderblock wall in colors to echo the shapes above.
Being a fair-skinned freckled red-head, I should have appreciated the shady efforts. But I knew everything there was to know about sun tanning, and spoke hubris fluently. I attended inner-city schools where the majority of my classmates had lovely yellow, brown or black skin. From Junior High right through my senior year in High School, I cheered my freckles on… “get together, get together, give me a tan!” Alas, I was melanin deficient, so all I ever got was lobster red and spotted. While I peeled, it was not very appealing.
One season, when I was cheerleader, I resorted to Coppertone’s Quick Tanning Lotion in order not to stand out as blue-white alongside my melanin abundant friends. QT Lotion smelled of popcorn and left my arms, legs and face looking more like a Fifty/Fifty Bar, than tanned. I was striped orange and white for the big game, yet the show went on. And I smelled like popcorn for several days.
Wouldn't it have been wonderful if I had someone to protect me from myself and my misguided efforts to be more colorful?
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